Why are we in this situation guys?
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They never developed a commercially viable solar cell. Someone else has. Instead they bought a steam turbine company
They told themselves that they could see around corners and were change makers. In fact neither were true and no one was allowed to tell them otherwise.
When the market for power turned then it became obvious that they were full of it.
A corporate breakup is ultimately an admission of failure: a concession that the parent company’s management wasn’t doing a good job and that their business was too big and complicated for them to handle.
The Activist investor, I thing you know who he is, is pushing GE to split up into pieces.
For a breakup to make fundamental sense, the sum of the cash flows of the resulting companies must exceed the cash flows of the former company. It will, in theory, bring in investors and boost stock price.
Will it work? Possibly. But it still points out a failure in management to "fix" things before a breakup was deemed necessary.
The demise of power is due to piss poor executive leadership. They were well compensated to adjust with market changes and develope and maintain options. They simply lacked vision and ability so they failed when the market changed. That's part of the power issue. They also accumulated to much debt but hey everyone else was doing it... right?? Greedy crooks.
Too much money went out, not enough came back in return. It didn't happen in one direction, it happened in multiple directions. From the single overpaid worker who underperformed with work that didn't bring more money in to the investments in new technology that returned nothing financially, to the products that went out the door and delivered poor quality. For the longest time I've been wondering how could GE maintain all of this. Now I know they never could. The ship sank before it came in.
The root cause for the demise of Power was, and still is a piiss-poor market for power/steam generation equipment.
Everything else only contributed: egos, daydreamers, ambition, M&A, CAS, phoney culture, arrogance...
company run by empty suits & buzzwords finally ran out of momentum... it was only a matter of time
Daydreamer Immelt lived in never never land demanding double digit growth. Poor acquisitions that never made it to never never land. Iniatives he predicted would make billions failed to reach expectations all killed cashflow.